Veterans Day

America was founded on the principle of nonintervention. George Washington’s sternest warning, in a farewell address our schoolchildren were long expected to commit to memory, was to avoid entanglements in the endless squabbles of Europe.

To this day we remain a people exceedingly reluctant to spend our young men’s lives to prop up some foreign regime — or to blindly hand over to government the additional power that always accompanies such crusades.

Some will argue the failure to similarly disengage from the outside world after 1945 — Cold War interventions in the oil states along Russia’s southern frontier — helped bring about the mass civilian murders of Sept. 11, 2001, by Muslim zealots outraged at the impotence of their own medieval culture in the face of the wealth, technology and competence of the West.

Others reply that the blind eye cast by the “peace movement” of the 1920s and ’30s on the rise of fascist Germany and Japan — and even Stalin’s Russia — only encouraged a second great war a mere 20 years after 1919. They contend that America’s determination to stay more active in the world since 1945, in contrast, has successfully staved off another world war for 62 years and counting.

That debate is unlikely to be resolved, here.

But one thing is clear: Refusing to defend our values and our homeland was no longer an option after Sept. 11.

And so it is that again tomorrow we find ourselves commemorating Veterans Day at a time when Americans are fighting on foreign soil, risking their lives to protect the liberties we so often take for granted.

At 11 minutes past the 11th hour of the 11th month — on this date in 1918 — the armistice was declared, ending World War I, the “War to End All Wars.”

As we now know, the chroniclers of that conflict were overly optimistic. In 1954, with a new generation of veterans to be honored, Armistice Day became Veterans Day, broader but at the same time more “generic,” and thus — sadly — easier to ignore.

That would be a mistake. There is something we can and must do to honor the 1.2 million members of our fighting forces who have died in service to our country since the American Revolution, as well as the 1.4 million who came home wounded.

Those who remain can honor those brave men and women by ensuring that the cause in which they fought remains just. We must zealously guard the liberties they willingly risk their lives to defend.

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. And it is with that vigilance that we can most truly honor the courage of the 23 million living American veterans who risked all to make us a better people and a stronger nation.

Honor them on Monday — and say a prayer for those who valiantly continue to safeguard our way of life.